"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall"Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman"A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today programme"Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife

Thursday, December 30, 2010

I spent today culling my collections and taking books and DVDs to the the charity shops in town. One of those I went to is the new Oxfam bookshop in Market Harborough, which opened in the autumn.

It is a good shop, but you have to feel sorry for those trying to make a living from the book trade - there is also an Age Concern bookshop nearby. At one time, maybe 10 years ago, Harborough had three secondhand bookshops and a junk shop with a good selection of bookshops too. Now there is only Christine's Book Cabin.

Still, if it helps Oxfam raise funds to send bloggers to New York, I am all in favour of it.

The Decorated west end of the south aisle at St Luke's Gaddesby, says Simon Jenkins, "appears to have been designed at the end of a riotous 14th-century party".

Elsewhere in Leicestershire, I found a newsreel about the kidnapping of an Earl Shilton boy in 1959.

And elsewhere on film, I discovered where the video for Paper Sun was filmed.

August

On holiday in Oxford, I met a fellow Lib Dem blogger. This holiday was to be the subject of posts for most of the rest of the year. I went on to Shropshrie, of course, and visited the Stiperstones Inn, of course.

Then it was off to New York, courtesy of Oxfam, to blog about the Millennium Development Goals summit at the UN. This was the view that met me when I came out of hotel and turned the corner. Probably the highlight of the week was attending a high-level meeting with Andrew Mitchell and the leading names in British development charities.

I returned to find Market Harborough had been taken over by the Pizzamen.

October

After many years writing House Points for Liberal Democrat News I decided to reinvent myself as the paper's TV critic with the fortnightly Calder on Air.

"It's been shocking to see the nursery for Labour wannabes, the National Union of Students, try to write off the hopes of a generation by implying that no poor person will be able to afford to go to university, when actually graduates on the lowest incomes will pay less under this scheme than they will under the NUS proposals." Caron's Musings welcomes the appointment of Simon Hughes as advocate for access to higher education, but asks why it is only for six months.

While A Liberal Helping argues that this appointment makes the role of Tim Farron as Lib Dem president more important.

Paul Crossley publicises the 38 Degrees petition against a factory farm for cows in Lincolnshire.

"You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?" The Guardian presents its Gaffes of the Year.

"One is caught between gloating and pity when viewing Australia’s current predicament; gloating because it has been a long time coming and pity because England fans know too well how it feels to be the underdog." Leg Side Filth considers England's victory at the MCG.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The first six months of the year, as seen on this blog. Part 2 is here.

January

The connections between rock music and the Shropshire hills were an early concern. The post cited one musician who recalled hanging out with a lethal combination of rock and roll A-list and Shropshire farmers.

Nick Clegg's Demos pamphlet The Liberal Moment inspired a series of posts, which were the source for a review article for Liberator.

Talking of Nevill Holt, I delved into the strange history of the prep school at Nevill Holt, the house that is the model for Bonkers Hall. I later had an email from the mother of a former pupil who said she could vouch for the truth of every story except the coffins - and she imagines those were found when the hall was turned back into a private house.

Mind you, the later rumour that Ozzy Osbourne was to buy the place does look to have been unfounded.

I complained that laughing at the Daily Mail too often takes the place of constructive thought among Liberals.

As I rather fell out of love with the Britblog Roundup - one fellow host wanted to choose all the links himself, another slagged off any submission that did not reflect his Toryboy views - February saw the launch of a new feature: Six of the Best.

I was invited into the old Kingdom Hall in Market Harborough a few days before it was pulled down.

March

Lib Dems should argue with the people they almost agree with, I argued.

Twenty years of Lord Bonkers were marked by a Liberator article in two parts (namely part 1 and part 2).

House Points argued that the Conservatives are ungovernable and set out Calder's three Laws of Politics.

I was asked down to London for the ITV Ask the Chancellors debate and liveblogged it from the green room. In retrospect, the evening marked the high point of Cablemania.

April

As the general election campaign gathered pace, I speculated on why it was that Why Gene Hunt had become a national hero, but Labour didn't get him.

My moaning about the Guardian predates its turning against the Coalition: "these days the loyal Guardian reader is obliged to believe that a boy of 14 is perfectly capable of interviewing someone applying to teach at his school but cannot be trusted to look after a goldfish."

00:22 I suppose we have to ask whether Christopher Martin-Jenkins is really called Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

00:17 The Flying Bellotti Brothers are putting on a gymnastic display while we all wait for the next wicket to fall. Sometimes I try to count how many of them there are, but I get a different answer every time.

00:15 Swann is on, bowling to Syd Little.

00:12 Ponting has been taken off to have his pinkie x-rayed. That happened to me once in Bangalore and it was Extremely Painful.

00:04 My spies in Melbourne tell me that Harris will definitely not bat. So we need only two more wickets.

00:00 Meadowcroft is looking forward to the Shipping Forecast.

23:58 This Martin-Jenkins fellow does get players' names wrong. He has just called Bresnan "Peggy Ashcroft".

23:54 Just has a comment from someone who doesn't know who Norman Featherstone is! Don't they teach obscure Middlesex batsmen of the 1970s in our schools nowadays?

I am trying to raise Michael Gove on the telephone as we speak.

23:50 There are two expressions that strike fear into the human soul:

See me in my study after Prayers

The next commentator will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins

23:48 If these two stick around Strauss should consider releasing the tiger sooner rather than later.

23:44 Syd Little is on strike for Tremlett's next over. Up the snoot, Christopher!

23:41 Why wasn't Harris made to hop out and bat? They'll be doing away with cold showers next.

23:39 I have received a few worried emails. Let me emphasise that there is no question of the Australian barman being burnt in the wicker man on the village green.

That is unless they are still batting at lunchtime, obviously.

23:37 Johnson bowled by Tremlett. Cleaned him up good and proper, as they say in the East End.

Syd Little is the new batsman.

23:36 The Australian barman from the Bonkers' Arms has just been dragged in by some stout locals. Now we shall have some jolly sport with him!

23:34 It's Tremlett from the other end. Give him one up the snoot!

23:31 That one went through him like a dose of Gregory's powder, as Nanny would have said.

23:30 Bresnan opens the bowling. Come on, Tim!

23:28 The room goes quiet here as the England fieldsmen come out.

The Australians have obviously been caught and made to come back.

23:26 Rather worried that there is still no mention of the Australians. I suspect they started a tunnel from their dressing room at lunch on the first day and are coming up on the other side of the fence even as we speak.

Hope this escape does not take too much of the lustre off our victory.

23:23 I am pleased to hear Sir Geoffrey Boycott on the wireless. His grandmother would often turn out for my XI and was a dependable opener - even though she insisted upon batting with a stick of rhubarb.

23:18 I refuse to open the champagne until victory is secured, but the Smithson and Greaves Northern Bitter is flowing.

Incidentally, what did you think of Upstairs Downstairs? Personally I like there to be an element of escapism in the drama I watch.

23:11 Have just looked out through the curtains here at the Hall. The light is very bad! I hope things are better in Melbourne.

23:07 It is never difficult to distinguish between an Australian journalist faced with imminent defeat and a ray of sunshine.

23:03 It sounds as though the Australian XI has fled. I did send a telegram to Strauss telling him to post sentries. Young people never listen.

23:01 I can hear Jonathan Agnew even without my ear trumpet. Splendid reception! But then I pride myself on throwing a good party.

22:59 We are doing our warm up exercises here at the Hall. One must be ready.

22:55 The contingent from the Bonkers' Arms has arrived. Raucous singing is the order of the day. "Why should we be beggars with a new ball in our hand?" and so forth.

22:51 Have made my peace with Meadowcroft. On reflection he is right: we have no need on "drop-in" pitches. Our current system of growing them in situ and having them rolled by captive Tory council candidates works perfectly well.

The champagne is on ice. (As is the Tizer for the Well-Behaved Orphans.)

22:48 Have had my footman turn the wireless on. One must give the valves time to warm up when the commentary is coming all the way from Australia.

22:46 That's more like it! I have got away and The Women's Institute are staging an excerpt from Swann Lake. (It involves a sharp caught and bowled in a 50 over game at Trent Bridge. I find the woman dancing Dwayne Bravo particularly convincing.)

22:40 I have been cornered by a woman who wants to talk about site value rating.

To be frank, I shall be relieved when the Home Service coverage begins.

22:35 I make the mistake of suggesting to Meadowcroft that we could have "drop-in" wickets here at the Hall.

He stomps off muttering about "befangled new ways" - but not before stuffing his pockets with vol-au-vents, I note.

22:24 I learn from the BBC that Simon Hughes is to be appointed as a "special advocate" for access to education.

How he will combine this with his commitments to Test Match Special is not made clear.

22:21 A bit of gossip from the party. Apparently, Eddie Hemmings' wife's cat has stolen his mistress! (I think I heard that right.)

22:15 I am shocked at the assumption that Harris will not bat this morning because he has broken his ankle.

What wimps we have become!

I can recall more than one case of a batsman being brought to the wicket After He Had Died in order to help his team fight for a draw. (That said, I was always opposed to fixtures against the touring Haitian Zombies being granted first-class status.)

And if Harris has his leg amputated before start of play? I can recall Peg-Leg Utterthwaite making 1000 runs for Derbyshire before the war, and you never heard him whinge!

22:07 What should England's tactics be? The general view here is that Tremlett should give Johnson one up the snoot early on.

22:00 I have just had a long conversation with the Reverend Hughes about the place of uncovered wickets in the modern Church.

Funny thing is, I could have sworn I heard him broadcasting from Melbourne this morning.

21:53 My guests are arriving. I have been chatting to Norman and Lynne Featherstone. And, look, there are David Steel and David Steele enjoying a joke on the stairs.

And here is Elspeth Campbell, whom I still think would have been a useful first change on that belter at Perth.

Some people - the Flying Bellotti Brothers, Don "R.E." Foster, Dutchy Mulholland - have been here ever since Christmas.

So have the Elves of Rockingham Forest. Strictly speaking they were never invited in the first place, but I find it is best to keep on the right side of these fellows. One doesn't want to be turned into a frog, what?

And a couple of the Well-Behaved Orphans have got over the wall again. I must have a word with Matron.

21:40 When Douglas Jardine won his series in Australia in 1932-3, we knew nothing of it until a lone swimmer appeared at Tilbury Docks with the scorecard of the final test tucked into his woollen bathing suit.

How times change!

This evening we shall all be gathered around the wireless here at Bonkers Hall to listen to England's victory in the Melbourne test. Do join me and my guests for the party.

I started choosing a Sunday music video when I finally got broadband access in October 2007. You can find the choices for 2007 and 2008 here and for 2009 here.

Some of these videos have disappeared since I posted them. Where possible, I shall edit the post and add an alternative version of the same song, but the moral is clear: enjoy these videos while they are still hot.

Monday, December 27, 2010

This shopfront took my fancy when I was in Camden for the Steve Winwood concert at the Roundhouse a couple of months ago.

The building is now occupied by a cafe, but a Camden News article from 2008 describes Palmers in its heyday:

George Palmer set up the shop in 1918 and counted famous faces among his customers. When Winston Churchill wanted a cat to prowl the corridors of Number 10, he popped into Palmers and went back to Whitehall with a ginger kitten. Mr Palmer was given a cigar and a signed copy of the PM’s autobiography as a thank-you. Charlie Chaplin wrote to them from Switzerland and bought two Abyssinian kittens.

Alison and Sue recall working as Saturday girls with their aunt, and the host of exotic creatures they shared the shop with. Sue said: “It was like a mini-zoo back then. The pet trade 50 years ago was amazing – you could literally sell anything. They had parrots, baboons, chimpanzees and mongooses.”

David Cameron looks set for an uphill challenge in making his vision of a "big society" a reality as new poll findings suggest people in Britain are more willing to give their money than their time to good causes.

A Harris poll for the Financial Times shows that the British public are more ready than most to make financial donations, but less happy about being asked to volunteer to deliver public services.

The findings raise doubts about the prime minister's aims of boosting "mutual responsibility" by supporting a new culture of volunteering and encouraging people to take an active role in their communities.

There is an odd reversal at work here. It used to be the left that had an optimistic, evenstarry eyed, view of the possibilities of social change.

Equally, it used to be the right that, as its waistcoat stretched over its stomach after dinner, said: "You can't change human nature." (Often it prefaced this remark with: "I used to be an idealist myself when I was young, but....")

These days the left is more concerned with defending existing public-sector spending and career paths than it is with bringing about social change. (It is, of course, just these public-sector employees who buy the Guardian and have their jobs advertised in its pages.)

There are those on the right who want cuts in public spending purely so they can cut taxes for themselves and their neighbours. However, given that all parties fought the last election affirming they would have to make radical spending cuts, these types take some disentangling from the political mainstream at the moment.

More interesting are those on the right who have grasped that government spending can entrench problems as well as solve them. Their "big society" remains a poorly defined concept, but it takes in ideas of localism and community control that, as a Liberal, I find very appealing.

It is because of big society ideas that I find myself surprisingly relaxed at out going into coalition with the Conservatives. What we need to do now is to ensure that they are put into practice.

Helen Duffet on Liberal Democrat Voice has the video of Vince Cable's appearance on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special. "You had total control and leadership. I thought it was really, really good. However, you have a tendency to lean slightly to the right," said that cheeky monkey Craig Revel-Horwood.

The Browser interviews the Lib Dem peer Alex Carlile about ethics in public life.

Ianvisits spent Christmas Day at a special opening of the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury. And he was not the only one: "I was in for maybe an hour, but could probably do 2 hours to look at everything properly. You just couldn’t get to see everything due to the crowds, unless you wanted to spend hours in the place waiting for gaps to appear at the displays."

This moralising carol was much used by beggars and others towards Christmas time. Its tune turns up over and again attached to such carols as The Fountain of Christ's Blood, Have You Not Heard of our Dear Saviour's Love, and The Black Decree, also to the favourite old dialogue-ballad of Death and the Lady, traceable to the sixteenth century.

What is behind the Daily Telegraph's campaign of entrapment against Liberal Democrat ministers?

The answer can be found in a House Points column I wrote after the resignation of David Laws. There I wrote of the Daily Telegraph

That newspaper is the focus for a group of malcontents who don’t just resent the coalition: they resent all the changes David Cameron has made to drag his party back into the political mainstream.

In their political Lalaland the country is crying out for hard right-wing government – the sort of policies that did so much to bring William Hague and Michael Howard success at the 2001 and 2005 general elections.

The ultimate goal of these right-wing Conservatives is to overthrow David Cameron. To do that they must break apart the coalition. And they are embarrassing Liberal Democrat ministers in an attempt to do just that.

On the Financial Times website George Parker offers much the same analysis:

Senior Tories admit some Conservative MPs hope the wheels may be coming off the coalition and it will not be long before the British public gets a chance to elect a true-blue government, abandoning what they perceive to be the coalition’s soft approach on issues such as Europe, crime and electoral reform.

“Those MPs are deluded, bonkers, mad,” said one Conservative minister. “If it were not for the Liberal Democrats, there would be no Conservatives in government.”

Another senior Conservative said: “To those of my colleagues who think it would be good to have a general election, then I say let’s have a February election and see how they like it. I’ve fought a February election and it’s not very much fun.”

Another favourite theme of mine is that modern Conservatives are not really Conservative at all. What they have to offer is crude libertarianism and an overweening sense of entitlement.

For the Conservative Party used to have a strong sense that this sort of entrapment and surveillance was unBritish. It was this sense that lay behind Winston Churchill's claim in the 1945 that Labour "would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo" in order to achieve socialism. From the same era, the High Tory novels of Angela Thirkell are full of paranoia about government snooping.

Today it is right-wing Conservatives who use the tactics of the secret police in an attempt to bring about radical change in society.

The first Coalition Home Office bill to receive Royal Assent sees the cancellation of Labour's national identity card scheme. Lynne Featherstone rejoices.

Blunt & Disorderly has advice for all three parties: "The Tories need to see that some of their policies are half-baked ideas (they don’t seem to have thought much about the Big Society, for example); Labour need to be constructive, not petty; and the Lib Dems need to stop being a punch bag and develop a vision of their role in government."

"A high self-regard, lack of even a short historical perspective, and fetishisation of their consumer electronics has given these protesters an obnoxious idea of their own novelty. Their yearning for the easy economy of the status quo ante makes them not a radical new force in British politics, but a conservative backlash against new uncertainties. They are far less interesting than they consider themselves to be." Stratagem XXXVIII has little time for the student protestors.

Missive from Doktorb considers what the new constituency boundaries may look like in Greater Manchester if the number of MPs is reduced. Pleasingly, Littleborough & Saddleworth is reborn.

I was of a child of the sixties, when road safety involved the rather stern Kerb Drill ("At the kerb, halt.") Come the 1970s and kids learnt the more touchy feely Green Cross Code. Found Objects has a video from 1976 in which Jon Pertwee can be seen teaching it. I am not sure "Splink!" ever caught on though.

Blood & Treasure celebrates "the only authentic Christmas record ever to hit the charts".

I don't know if it was inverse sexism or a desire to find something positive to say about someone, but I was too kind to Sarah Montague. She has an annoying strangulated voice and tends to approach interviews with a fixed, tendentiouss line of questioning in mind and to keep to it even when the first answer shows that she has got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

BackgroundToday

One morning last month I drifted out of sleep to find that Radio 4 had changed. There was no Today programme. Instead I woke up to an old episode of Matthew Parris’s Great Lives in which Lord Digby Jones spoke about his admiration for Winston Churchill. This was interesting, but turned embarrassing when it became clear that Jones sees himself as a bit of a Churchill figure too. Then there was a blissful episode of The Natural World, describing oystercatchers feeding on the shining mudflats at the mouth of the River Nene. I went to work happy.

I don’t suppose I was alone in enjoying this programming – the result of a BBC strike. When there was a major technical breakdown a few years ago and Today had to be replaced by music, the programme received more letters asking what the music had been than it received complaints.

Like me, I suspect many of those correspondents listen to the Today programme because they always listen to the Today programme. It becomes part of your morning routine. (Thought for the Day? It’s time I was brushing my teeth.) You do not listen to Today for enjoyment.

It would be easy to blame the presenters for this. John Humphrys glories in his ignorance of anything to do with science. Jim Naughtie is bursting to interrupt as soon as he finished one of his interminable questions – you can hear him making little noises all the time the interviewee is speaking. If the subject is something that Naughtie thinks himself an expert on, such as music, then the other person doesn’t get to speak at all.

Evan Davis is incredulous if he hears facts or opinions that are new to him. Edward Stourton has a habit of sounding superior by talking down his nose – just as Martin Jarvis makes Hubert Lane do in his readings of the Just William books. I bet they even look the same

Sarah Montague and Justin Webb offer more hope, yet I recently read an article by Webb in which he said that now he has settled in he is going to interrupt people more.

But really the problem is not the individual presenters, but the format of the programme. Ministers, journalists and professors are brought on to be interviewed, and they get five minutes if they are lucky. Often there are two people in the same slot, so they get hardly any time at all.

This format generally leads to unsatisfactory interviews and can be exploited. During the months when Railtrack had brought Britain’s railways to a halt, its executives who went on Today had obviously been taught to say nothing and say it slowly and repetitively. They knew that time would run out before the interviewer could hold them to account on behalf of the public.

So Justin Webb’s resolution to interrupt people more arises not from a love of the sound of his own voice so much as from a despairing attempt to make the programme’s rigid format work.

Is there an alternative? For a while Radio 5’s breakfast show did essentially the same job, but did it in a friendlier and looser way. It also helped that they had two presenters – Peter Allen and Jane Garvey – who were without the exaggerated sense of their own importance that those on the Today programme tend to develop.

Allen could rival Humphrys in the grumpy old man stakes when he wanted, but if it became clear that a politician was determined to say nothing of any interest to anyone then he was quite prepared to cut the interview short. This was far more damning – and far kinder to the listener – than any amount of Today-style bluster.

Then Allen and Garvey were replaced by Nicky Campbell and Victoria Derbyshire, two of the most irritating broadcasters known to humanity. So it was back to Today.

David Howarth, the former Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, has an article on the Guardian website asking whether Daily Telegraph journalists broke the criminal law in order to obtain their stories about Vince Cable and his colleagues:

Did the journalists and their editors intend through dishonest false statements to put ministers at risk of losing their jobs? Did they intend to make money for their paper? If either is true, a criminal offence has taken place. There is no free-standing public interest defence. Perhaps the journalists involved should now be preparing their answers to those questions.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

This amateur film is a piece of railway history as it shows the Leicester & Swannington just before it closed in 1964. The line already looks derelict, so it is a surprise when a train turns up towards the end.

The Leicester & Swannington was one of the first railways of the steam age, built to bring coal to Leicester from the west of the county. 15C has a few photographs of the line today

I read it as an honest account of what any government is like on the inside. As Vince himself says:

“You know I have never been in government, never been a minister, so I have no idea what it was like under the Labour government. My general impression was that it was more, they were same philosophy, but they didn’t like each other and it was very personal, whereas with the Tories, it is more professional. We may not have anything in common, but you have a professional process by which you arbitrate, negotiate and produce compromises. And the Cabinet does function as a Cabinet, in the way it is supposed to in the textbooks. We debate things across the table.”

In fact it sounds as though this government is operating more satisfactorily than most in living memory.

And Liberal Democrat members will be reassured to learn that our ministers are busy fighting to get our policies implemented.

Still, the Telegraph bills this as the first of several exposes of what Lib Dem MPs are saying in private, so we shall see if anything more damaging is to come.

It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around the castle the snow lay as it ought to lie. It hung heavily on the battlements, like extremely thick icing on a very good cake, and in a few convenient places it modestly turned itself into the clearest icicles of the greatest possible length. It hung on the boughs of the forest trees in rounded lumps, even better than apple blossom, and occasionally slid off the roofs of the village when it saw a chance of falling upon some amusing character and giving pleasure to all.

The boys made snowballs with it, but never put stones in them to hurt each other, and the dogs, when they were taken out to scombre, bit it and rolled in it, and looked surprised but delighted when they vanished into bigger drifts. There was skating on the moat, which roared all day with the gliding steel, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry.

The owls hooted. The cooks put out all the crumbs they could for the small birds. The villagers brought out their red mufflers. Sir Ector’s face shone redder even than these.

And reddest of all shone the cottage fires down the main street of an evening, while the winds howled outside and the old English wolves wandered around slavering in an appropriate manner, or sometimes peeping in at the keyholes with their blood-red eyes.

Now you see where Christmas at Bonkers Hall comes from.

Oh, and "scombre"? According to the University of Rochester glossary for The Once and Future King, it is a variant of scumber: "intr. Of a dog or fox: To evacuate the fæces.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

I have written before about 1990, the drama series about a dystopian future starring Edward Woodward and shown in 1977 and 1978.

The good news is that several episodes from the first series can be found on Youtube. The video above is the first part of the first series - just follow the links in Youtube after that.

I have not watched much of it yet. If old programmes turn out not to be as good as you remember them, it is worse than a disappointment because it spoils your original memory too. But see what you think.

Do remember that 1990 was far in the future when this was made.

Later. Most of 1990 has disappeared from Youtube, but here is a taste.

I am very sorry to hear that Anthony Howard has died. As I recalled back in 2005, I learnt a tremendous amount from the New Statesman under his editorship:

When I was in the sixth form I used to hurry down to Preedy's after school on Fridays to buy their only copy of the New Statesman. I usually got it, though I do recall missing out on the controversial issue produced to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee. In those days before Princess Di and the royals' sell out to celebrity culture, it was still controversial to attack the monarchy.

For my 25p I got a leading article on the front page (which seemed terribly grown up), James Fenton's witty political commentary on page 2 and a Garland cartoon on page 3. Though I was pretty sure by then that I was a liberal and not a socialist, there was an awful lot to enjoy in the Statesman.

For that reason it meant a lot to me to write for a column for the magazine's website for a while. Now the magazine is unreadable to anyone not steeped in Labour's internal politics, which is much what happened to it after Howard gave up as editor in 1978.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Donald Trelford as saying:

"Tony had a prodigious memory for political anecdotes which stood him in good stead in later years as a book reviewer. He was an excellent editor of the New Statesman and The Listener and, if the timing of his career had been more fortunate, he should have edited a national newspaper."

Joanna Newsom's "Have One on Me", her third LP, is Uncut magazine's Album of the Year. It finds her occupying territory somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush.

This song, a lament for a child who is lost or never was, is described by the BBC Music review as "is lonesome country that builds into a majestic strut of spindly electric guitar and oriental melodies". This live performance was recorded in Amsterdam in May of this year.

I have always felt a little guilty about the picture I have painted more than once of the young Miliband brothers in their pyjamas listening to their father's tales of how Stalin had diverted the rivers of Central Asia to water the Uzbek cotton fields. Miliband père was on the far left, but he was no tankie.

But today's news in the Observer that Ed Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word "coalition" to describe the government makes me think I may have been on to something after all. This is a crude and clumsy attempt to deny the truth. It is double plus ungood.

An interesting question is whether Miliband's senior colleagues will take much notice. If they have sufficient strength of mind to be cabinet ministers, they will not take kindly to having their speech policed like this. And most of them did not want Ed as leader but his brother.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Are the Tories giving the Lib Dems a free ride in Oldham East? asks Mark Ferguson on LabourList. He adds: "Although Labour are the bookies' favourites for the January 13th poll, sources close to the Labour campaign have suggested that they expect a close race. Having the Tories take things easily will certainly make things more difficult for Labour."

Jerry Hayes on ThinkPolitics gives another take on the forthcoming by-election: "The potential victim in this strange little event is MiliEd. He will be out classed and outshined by Balls. he will give the impression of being the organ grinder’s monkey If, in the unlikely event that Labour, wins he will only get some of the credit, but there will be screams to move Balls to a more visible role. Screams that MiliEd would be unwise to ignore, but loathe to act on."

Craig Dearden-Phillips on Social Enterprise asks another question: Are mutuals fit for purpose? "What does all this mean for public services? Perhaps the strongest message I got is that for the magic of employee ownership to work, it is vital that employee ownership is as near-total as possible."

While Andrew Hickey marks the passing of Captain Beefheart: "Beefheart is actually less original than his music sounds, but he was one of the great imaginative *synthesists* of all time, putting together the timbre of Chicago blues with the tonalities and rhythms of Ornette Coleman, and adding beat poetry on top."

Friday, December 17, 2010

The continuing influence of the Tony Blair model of political leadership can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the three party leaders' choice of Christmas card.

Following the unlovable precedent set by the Blairs - who in their pomp seemed poised to supplant the Holy Family altogether - Cameron, Miliband and Clegg have each chosen a card depicting himself and his family. Nick Clegg has chosen a drawing by his children rather than a photograph, which makes his offence greater or letter according to your taste.

The whole concept seems vainglorious to me. What is wrong with something like a tasteful print of Bonkers Hall in the snow?

there now remain very few Lib Dem backbenchers who have remained loyal to the Coalition. Just nine backbench Lib Dems have not voted against the whips in this Parliament. Of these, four – Lorely Burt, Simon Hughes, Tessa Munt and Stephen Williams – abstained on tuition fees.

That leaves five Lib Dem MPs on the backbenches who have remained wholly loyal to the Coalition thus far. In addition to David Laws, they are Tom Brake, Malcolm Bruce, and Don Foster (all of whom voted in favour of raising the cap on tuition fees on Thursday) along with Sir Robert Smith (abroad on business at the time of the tuition fees vote).

Thanks to a tweet from the London Review of Books. It does not seem possible to link to individual posts on revolts.co.uk, but this one is on top at the time of writing.

The winner is Isis, a female Egyptian grasshopper. If things had turned out differently she could be curled up in front of my fire now. For she was found up in a bag of salad bought from Sainsbury's Market Harborough.

More in the Leicester Mercury, where Helen Ikin, the grasshopper recorder for Leicestershire Entomological Society (who wins Job of the Day, incidentally), is quoted as saying:

"It's not exactly common for people to find them, but if something is found in food that has travelled from that part of the world it is usually an Egyptian grasshopper. A lot of people do keep them as pets. They are lovely creatures."

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Walking Englishman has a map and photographs of a walk in the countryside around Bonkers Hall - or Nevill Holt as he calls it for a some reason. Although the walk lies entirely in Leicestershire, this is precisely the area in which I imagine Lord Bonkers living.

This photograph, showing Nevill Holt, comes from the same article. There are hundreds more walks on the site.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like.

So said Edward Thurlow, the 18th century Lord Chancellor.

Andrew Simms and David Boyle’s new book Eminent Corporations does much to bear this view out through its histories of eight famous British companies from the East India Company to Virgin. They tap into a rich lode of history with which I was largely unfamiliar.

The pattern is set in the first chapter on the East India Company, which is contributed by Nick Robins. Remarkable figures crop up, where many famous names are encountered: Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

And so on through Barclays, Cadburys, Marks & Spencer, Rover and BP to the BBC and Virgin. Many remarkable figures are encountered along the way, none more so than Michael Marks. He was born as the youngest of five children of a miller and tailor in what is now Belarus “probably in 1863”. Driven out by a pogrom, he arrived in London as a teenager who spoke only Yiddish. He ended up in Yorkshire working as a peddler and then running a market stall. He opened his first shop in Manchester in 1894 and then rest is history – a fascinating history detailed in Eminent Corporations.

Simms and Boyle’s model is Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which is a slight problem for me in that I have far more time for those Victorians than I do for Strachey and his Bloomsbury companions. Strachey was concerned simply with showing that his subjects were too, too amusing, but his modern successors want to point morals. At times, with sudden lectures on the wickedness of Big Oil or claims that television is undermining our culture, they risk appearing tendentious.

If there is a moral it is probably more to do with the inevitable decline and fall of business dynasties. Again and again, we see family companies bringing in outside managers or becoming public companies, only for what made them great and distinctive being lost.

But it is for the stories and the great figures that you should read this book. I can see company histories written along these lines becoming an unexpected publishing success story.

There is a review of Eminent Corporations in the Financial Times by Jeremy Leggett.

We were important than we realised, even before we went into government. The Guardian has details of cables discussing the Liberal Democrats, obtained from Wikileaks, sent back to the US by its London embassy.

A lot of the material is a convoluted account of events early in Nick Clegg's leadership when the party abstained on the question of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, having in the past called for one. The (rather tenuous) grounds given were that we wanted a referendum on our membership of the EU as a whole.

It is all ancient history now, and a reminder that debates which stir the passions are generally soon forgotten. Still, I hope we have heard the last of that ludicrous "in or out" referendum as a policy.

There is also an account of a complaint by Lembit Opik (presumably in a loud voice at a party) about Nick Clegg's leadership style. Oh, and:

"Opik told us he plans to run for Lib Dem President (a leadership role, but subordinate to Clegg) at the end of the year to give the Lib Dems an alternate voice inside the party."

For some reason the Guardian has decided that the section dealing with Lembit is the most important and highlighted it for you.

Finally, and in a way most revealingly, there is a glimpse of Ming Campbell's leadership:

XXXXXXXXXXXX says that so far Clegg has been decisive and thoughtful. In contrast, XXXXXXXXXXXX said, former leader Sir Menzies "Ming" Campbell was more like a chairman of the board, a style not in keeping with the way the unruly party actually operates. For example, XXXXXXXXXXXX said, Campbell would give directives while not understanding that the organizational structure to impose his edicts did not exist.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

On The Real Blog, David Boyle skewers the snobbery and instinctive support for centralisation of the BBC: "So stuff the BBC, I say – and the idea that decisions can only taken, under close guidance, by Oxbridge types with Masters in Public Administration. And only then, very occasionally. What the Localism Bill sets out is a means by which neighbourhoods can begin to take charge of their own destiny."

While Andy Mayer, writing on Liberal Vision, is not impressed by Richard Grayson's decision to work with Ed Miliband.

The big news in the blogosphere today is the decision by Iain Dale to hang up his mouse. Along with Tim Worstall, Iain's was one of the sites that got me into blogging and showed me how to do it. Thank you, Iain.

Jacob Heilbrunn, writing on The Huffington Post, pays tribute to the greatness of Richard Holbrooke.

And in comedy, chicolita gives Frankie Boyle both barrels: "So please, don’t even try to tell me Boyle speaks truth to power, or says the unsayable. He won’t go near half the subjects Sadowitz covered 20 years ago and still does with astounding relish today. He mocks the weak and that includes those gullible enough to pay for the same dull crap in different packaging. It’s not offensive, just the comedy of complacency."

Chess, it seems, has always attracted craftsmen, artists and conversation as well as players. Whether or not you know the rules of the game, its language and concepts are pervasive and over the next week on Radio 3 we’ve a short season, Checkmate, exploring the game’s extraordinarily rich history and culture through a range of discussions, talks, and drama.

Ed Miliband announced today that the former Liberal Democrat policy chief Richard Grayson will be contributing to the Labour Party's policy review. I fear that the Labour leader may be disappointed with the outcome.

I knew Richard when I was a member of the Federal Policy Committee for several years. I found him an amiable figure and it turned out that we had both attended Hemel Hempstead School at different times. In fact, the same teacher had taught Richard, his father and me.

But my chief memory of Richard's part in the committee's work was that he could get impatient if members proposed ideas that stood outside the social democrat mainstream. Perhaps that it was one reason why in that era the Liberal Democrats produced so many "us too" documents that could equally well have come from New Labour.

So if Ed Miliband is looking to Richard Grayson to leaven Labour's thinking he may be disappointed.

One of the arguments often used against proportional representation is that it will lead to a dull form of politics where all the parties are clustered on the same narrow strip of ground.

Nonsense, the advocates of PR have taken to replying. Under proportional systems parties have to make more effort of make themselves distinctive.

Is that true? And if it is true, what do voters in other countries make of this state of affairs?

The Liberal Democrat policy of having no rise in tuition fees - and ultimately abolishing them - was clear enough. But we were only ever going to enter government as the junior party in a coalition, and both Labour and the Conservatives were committed to raising fees. So though this policy was certainly distinctive, it was not one we were ever going to be able to put into practice.

Do voters abroad accept this sort of behaviour on the part of junior coalition parties because they are more used to coalitions? And if British voters will not accept it, how should we frame our proposals in future elections?

Sunday, December 12, 2010

British pop music in the early 1960s was dominated by a few impresarios. The early excitement of rock and roll had been tamed and the forces of commerce were firmly in charge again. In short the situation was much like the one British pop finds itself in today.

So it is a surprise to find such a sultry British single from 1960. Fury's version, which was a minor hit, is a cover of the original (far sunnier) US version by Jimmy Jones. It became more widely known after being used on a Toyota television commercial in the 1990s.

Because of Charles Kennedy's indolence as leader, Richard Grayson had a large say in the running of the party for many years. Which makes him a slightly unconvincing representative of the party's grassroots in today's front-page Observer report by Anushka Asthana and Allegra Stratton.

Richard Grayson has an article of his own on the Guardian website in which he complains:

all we hear from Nick Clegg is lots about John Stuart Mill. Rarely, if ever, is there talk of the Liberals cited by Ed Miliband, nor the originators of social liberalism such as LT Hobhouse or TH Green. A philosophy which seldom goes beyond Mill is firmly stuck in the 1850s, as if more than a century of social liberalism never happened.

The explanation for this can largely be found in an article on Mill that I wrote for Liberator in 2007:

It is fashionable to name check L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, but I suspect that few who do so have really read their works. Hobhouse’s Liberalism is approachable, but hardly profound when set against Mill, while Green is next to unreadable. In part this is because Green’s heyday came during that brief period in the late nineteenth century when Idealism was the dominant force in British philosophy, and it is hard for we 21st-century realists to make much of him as a result. Equally, however, there was a tension in Green’s thought between his espousal of liberty and the enthusiasms, such as Temperance, which he derived from his religious views. The suspicion must be that he sometimes found it convenient to take refuge in obfuscation.

In short, Green is unreadable and Hobhouse is not that good. But I do strongly recommend Peter Clarke's Liberals and Social Democrats, which looks at the intellectual circles of which Hobhouse was a member.

I was also a little amused that Richard complains that Nick Clegg is stuck in the past, but can offer no alternative thinkers more recent than Hobhouse (who died in 1929) and Green (who died in 1882 ). I wonder what Professor Grayson would make of a student essay that presented these two as representatives of modernity?

In my Liberator article I did manage to mention more recent names: Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Richard Rorty (who had only just died when I wrote it). But what we really need are some current-day Liberal thinkers.

Friday, December 10, 2010

A 20-minute film showing a day in the life of York's station master. It's deeply nostalgic for me: the city did not change so very much between 1953 and 1978, when I went there as a student. It has certainly changed a great deal since I left in 1981.

Note the lyrical treatment of the lifting of rural branch lines. I don't suppose that parcel van lasted very long, but at least it is a reminder that closures began long before Lord Beeching.

The complete abolition of university tuition fees remains Liberal Democrat policy. In a powerful post, Contrasting Sounds looks at the daunting road that will have to be travelled if we are to get there. Meanwhile, "As it stands, the party policy just doesn’t reflect the democratic reality that the larger parties have no plan to increase taxes, because they (or at least Labour) don’t think people are willing to vote for it. This means the manifesto promises are more about keeping the party’s base happy than letting the electorate know what the party genuinely thinks they can get through Parliament."

In another important post, Millennium Elephant looks at the way forward for the Liberal Democrats after the tuition fees vote. If, as someone who himself perhaps hid behind a fictional persona for too long, I can offer a little unrequested advice, I feel that the idiosyncratic style of the posts on this blog is beginning to grate with the quality and seriousness of their content.

Liberal Vision, in the shape of Tom Papworth, has been reading the comments on the tuition fees controversy that the BBC website published yesterday. He finds a far greater range of views represented than most professional commentators would have you believe.

In a posting that went up last week while I was busy being a dutiful son, Jennie Rigg socks it to the Lighter Later crowd.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

My favourite Shropshire hill ranges featured in this week's The Living World on Radio 4:

Lionel Kelleway travels to a remote part of Shropshire where thankfully the raven is making a remarkable comeback. Here on the Stiperstones National Nature Reserve he meets up with Leo Smith and Tom Wall from the Shropshire Raven Study Group, a group who have been studying these magnificent birds for nearly 20 years, and who have recorded the changes in the fortunes for these huge members of the crow family.

How has the magazine been getting on since it decided it could manage without my services?

The new Private Eye provides us with a clue:

Insiders at the New Statesman confirm that although editor Jason Cowley earns a handsome six-figure salary, around a third of his staff are unpaid interns. A review of their jobs board confirms that their soon-to-be-launched sister mag, Charity Insight, plans to staff itself from a rolling stock of unpaid interns with no guaranteed job at the end.

There was much hilarity this time last year when it was announced that Swindon was to be twinned with Disney World in Florida.

But, according to a report in the Swindon Advertiser, much good has come from the initiative. Most important as far as this blog is concerned, Disney staff have been helping renovate the garden of the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate.